Do we need self-destructive feeding?

Wang, Yuxuan Melody. (in prep). Do we need self-destructive feeding? Ms., Harvard University.

Abstract: Opacity can be observed in pairwise rule orderings other than counterfeeding and counterbleeding, one of which being ‘self-destructive feeding’. In this paper, I review all the self-destructive feeding examples documented, and demonstrate their nature by providing a unified account in Parallel OT with the help of underspecification and contextual faithfulness constraints. I begin by showing the formal similarities shared by all the cases of self-destructive feeding and highlighting two of their common characteristics that previous literature on self-destructive feeding has neglected: (1) they all involve instances of non-derived environment blocking; and (2) they both attempt to simplify consonant clusters with a less common method. A new analysis in Parallel OT is then provided. I argue that the new proposal not only shows that opacity can be dealt with in Standard OT once the UR is more properly understood, but also offers a new angle to analyse self-destructive feeding: as an epiphenomenon of phonologically-conditioned allomorph optimisation, rather than a separate type of opaque interaction between two rules that non-restrictively apply in a language.